I walked through my front door at 20:15 last night feeling beaten and broken. My brain felt like it had been placed in a blender on high–simple thoughts felt like complex calculus equations.

It wasn’t a bad week, per say. It was simply busy beyond belief. And it wasn’t really a fun busy in which I was floating from one fascinating challenge to another. No, it was just wall-to-wall basic simple tasks.

Wednesday, setting a personal record, I had medications due every hour for 12 hours straight. Who has time for the “art of nursing” when all you do is dispense medications? Often, there were so many meds due that no sooner had I just finished one hour’s meds when it was time to start the next hour’s. I remember sitting there in one patient’s room looking at a line-up of six IV piggy backs, wondering how I would get them all in before the next hour’s collection. You know you need more access when…..

Everyone had sliding-scale insulin every four or six hours. I felt like I was running a diabetes unit! They all had multiple drain dressings. They all needed TPN prepared and hung at 17:00. And, of course, they all needed to go for x-rays, CT scans, rehabilitation etc.

All of them were upset because the doctors kept telling them they would do one thing, and then they would either forget to put in the orders, or do something completely different.

The patients were all needy, anxious, demanding, and came with family that were even more needy, anxious, and demanding. My favorite family member was a physician who practices in a completely different area of medicine–not a surgeon, and not even the same part of the body–and he’s from a different city. However, this certainly didn’t stop him from trying to give me verbal orders. At one point he even started paging department heads to come and consult on “his” patient.

My other favorite family member of the week was a wife of another patient. She stopped me as I was almost running down the hallway. Here’s an exact-ish quote of what she said: “My husband seems a little drowsy since you increased his fentanyl dose. Could you weigh him and perhaps calculate the half-life of the fentanyl for me. And his blood pressure was 120/75 last time–which is still worrying me since it is usually in the 130s systolic.”

In one hand I had a non-rebreather, and in the other hand I grasped several vials of ventolin. I wore a calm, yet sufficiently panicked look on my face. My other patient was gasping for air in respiratory distress.

“I’m sorry, I can’t right now, I have an emergency!” I said as I tried to get around her. She had blocked me in. “I’ll be there when I have time.”

She mumbled something about nursing care and incompetent and stomped toward the front desk. I presumed she was looking for the charge nurse who was actually with me helping the distressed patient.

*sigh*

Family-centred nursing just isn’t appropriate all the time, and it certainly doesn’t always work.